


The Wasteland

by Oceanbreeze7



Category: Alex Rider - Anthony Horowitz
Genre: Alex Rider Needs a Hug, Alex Rider has PTSD, Alex Rider is a Mess, Body Horror, Gen, Groundhog Day, I spent so long on this and I really shot myself in the foot but by god i'm amazed this worked, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Kinda?, Poetic, Supernatural Elements, Yassen Gregorovich Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-14
Updated: 2020-07-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:40:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25271800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oceanbreeze7/pseuds/Oceanbreeze7
Summary: Alex knew April was the cruellest month.The body washesLike drifting logsDown the Greenwich reachPast the Isle of DogsWeilalala leiaWallala leialala“Yassen,” he said, “what have we given?”Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Comments: 26
Kudos: 69





	The Wasteland

**Author's Note:**

> This took  
> so  
> goddamn long
> 
> but you know what? This is one of the most amazing things I've ever accomplished.  
> I can't believe I DID THIS
> 
> In case you all are curious, [Here is The Wasteland Poem!!](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land)
> 
> I STILL CAN'T BELIEVE I MANAGED THIS

# i The Burial of the Dead

Alex knew April was the cruellest month. It came in waves of springtime air, tortoiseshell appearance against the rain. April meant he would walk outside, scuffing his shoes on sidewalk cracks and waving to bikers in traffic.

He used to marvel at the lilacs, appearing from grass bedrock. Mixing with the last dredges of winter memory turned to hospice in the sun. Removed, replaced with dull worm roots and spring rainwater that trailed off patio umbrellas and plastic awnings. 

Winter kept him warm, covered. Draped in flannel and siping chocolate as Ian and Jack complained over the snowy weather. The ground was hidden and stagnant, Alex feeding his stomach with grocer meat-products and dried tubers.

Summer was incredibility; thunderbolts over Munich as he ran down phantom roadmaps. Where he once walked with company, pickpocketing, and sightseeing. Rain showered over the Starnberger Sea, chasing sunlight where Alex sat in the Hofgarten. Drinking coffee and talking in accents as his uncle corrected his stutter. And when Alex was younger, Ian took him to Rosenheim and climbed the shadow of Brunnstein. Alex had been afraid at the peak, held tight on the precipice as down they flew on metal cords.

_‘In the mountains,’_ Ian said, _‘you are free.’_

‡

Alex wondered what roots could clutch, or what branches grew from the stony walls. The long cat-stretched shadows that contorted rock into flatlands.

Alex couldn’t name them, the plants or fruit that lived in the desert. He knew the files, the heap of broken images from the outskirts of Shobak, where the sun beat its wings and dead trees gave no shelter.

And the dry stone drank no water, only bartered shade in its cracks that stretched deep and far like bleeding fjords of inverted mountains.

_‘Go in under the shadow of the red rock,’_ they said. Do not stand tall and watch your shadow stretch as morning too would turn him red. _‘You will find there something different.’_

So Alex walked through fossil tributaries, an outlast to his shadow striding behind and its forward step as evening greeted him.

Reluctant, resistant to a nameless recipient, Alex thought: _I will show you fear in a handful of dust._

Ian had said, _“Aller anfang ist schwer.”_

_‘Every beginning is hard,’_ \- and yet tipping from a summit, supported by faith, Alex’s throat failed. He could not speak, neither living nor dead. He knew nothing, looking into the heart of the sky, and the silence.

‡

Mrs. Jones, the famous woman herself, had a pink eye the last time Alex saw her. The cleverest of MI6, she gave him a file and said, _‘this is your mission, we aren’t sure what you’ll find.’_

(He looked at sandstone carved cherubs and wished for a camera).

_‘Here is the hospital report, the last strike from drones. The danger of Jordan, and Petra.’_

Alex knew what she wouldn’t say when they all knew from the start. _‘And here is Alex,’_ he remembered scathingly. _‘Our great helpless fool. The last card of the arcana, but our first tool in the arsenal.’_

Alex saw crowds of liars, walking around in a show. Signing off papers and wishing him luck. Alex said, in his anger, before he left for the desert. _“I have my own fortune for you: go fuck yourself.”_

Petra spread higher, but its false copy stretched deep. An unreal city, under a brown fog of pollution. 

It resembled its original, caged by crowds and tour leaders. A flood of world travellers, flowing over once holy pathways. A dead temple; Alex had not thought death had undone so many.

Alex sighed, short and infrequent. Set his eyes on his feet and flowed up the rock-ways and down the ancient doorway. His flashlight pierced darkness but not further than shadows. Alex felt the eyes on his shoulders, the heavyweight on his back. He wondered about the starving ground- if it would feast on his body below the Earth. If his corpse planted would begin to sprout, if he would bloom the next year. 

# ii- A Game of Chess

The inner entrails of the red rock dagoba held statues turned blind in deprivation. A tall faceless human, androgynous in features sat on a burnished throne, glowing like marble under Alex’s light. The chair held up by carved fruiting vines, where crimson cupid peeped curious at their guest. Alex traced their faces, eroded purposefully to a blank canvas. One cupid hid itself behind a wing, too shy for mortal eyes.

Alex’s torch doubled the light that a flame could create, reflecting on desert glass around its throat. The glitter of jewels deserving satin cases.

“Hello,” he said. Walking closer to the carving, tracing its chiselled blemishes, he smelled the decay of sand. “You’ve been here a while, haven’t you?”

It deserved any museum, placed in sunlight and synthetic perfumes. Surrounded by strangers confounded with the smallest of problems: troubled, lost, confused.

“You don’t deserve that,” said Alex. “Those people, that pedestal.”

It lived in the darkness, above an antique mantel which displayed a staircase descending deeper. So rudely ignored, its guardian stood vigil with eroded eye sockets and the scream of sandstorms.

Alex took careful steps down the stairwell. The nightingale, with its inviolable voice, cried out its luck. And the world pursues, to Alex ears it says _Thrum._

The othered withered stumps of rock, a polaroid of time, were pinned on the walls in half-finished carvings. Staring forms without eyes, leaning out, leaning, hushing Alex with every breath.

Footsteps shuffled on the stair, under the torchlight, under the gaze if a fiery power. Burning its words, then becoming savagely still.

“Bloody Hell,” he shuddered, scratching his arm for something to do. “I don’t normally get freaked out but what is _with_ this place?”

“You all have no faces,” he said to the statues. “Did they run out of time to finish carving you? Why did they leave your eyes for last?”

“What were they thinking? This place is…”

_‘I think I am in the lost valley,’_ Alex thought. _‘Where the dead men lost their bones.’_

“What is that noise?” he asked.

_The wind through the corridors._

“How did wind get this far underground?”

_Nothing, nothing, nada._

“Gosh Alex,” he scolded himself. “Do you know nothing- of _course,_ there’s nothing-.”

_Do you see nothing? Do you remember-_ “Nothing?”

Alex remembered the pearls in Jack’s eyes on her last birthday. He remembered the shade of her iris, as he fell from the walkway and smashed his skull into sandstone-

_Thrum_

“Are you alive, or not?” Alex asked, fingers digging into the sand. “Is there- is there _nothing_ in your head?”

And below that, he thought terrified, _‘...but.’_

Jack was so happy on her birthday, holding that Shakespearian book she wanted- so elegant, so intelligent.

“What the _hell?”_ Alex breathed. “What the- oh God, oh _God.”_

He would rush out if he could, up the stairwell and walk the canyon to sunrise. Walk out with his flashlight and ask Jones for a way home. 

“Fuck,” Alex wheezed through hyperventilation, “what do- what do I _do?”_

_You fell from the walkway._

Ian told him the mountains would make him-

_You split your skull on the rock in a small accident._

He was fine, it was a hallucination-

_Pressing lidless eyes in the dirt, and woke up like it never happened._

When Ian didn’t return that night when police officers lied about seatbelts. Alex said to the sky himself: HURRY UP PLEASE.

And then Ian didn’t come back, and he was _smart._ And his will told Alex what to do with the money he gave him. To go to school, to get braces, to _get yourself some teeth._ (Alex did, Jack was there). Alex told her he couldn’t bear to look at them, and he still couldn’t- he’d think of Ian.

“He’s been dead a year now,” Alex whispered quietly. “Apparently he killed people, and then some others killed him.”

Alex used to wonder if it was something he said, that made Ian keep thins secret. That stopped him from speaking and made him give Alex that one look.

_(HURRY UP PLEASE)_

“I don’t like it,” Alex said, “all the killing. MI6.”

He thought Ian would have warned him, said something like: _Others can pick and choose if you can’t._

Alex made sure that Jack would be alright, that she wouldn’t be targeted. 

_“Why are you getting grey hair?”_ she asked him, _“you’re going ancient!”_

(Ian died only thirty-one)/

_“I can’t help it,”_ Alex lied. _“It’s classes. There’s so many...assignments.”_

(He’s had five already, and nearly died twice).

_“You’re lucky your chemistry teacher said late work is alright.”_

And Alex smiled fakely and said, _“I’m just a fool I guess.”_

(HURRY UP PLEASE)

That Sunday Alex went to the bank, had this mission assignment. And they asked him to investigate, to find the beauty of such a hot-

(HURRY UP PLEASE)

-and Alex slipped and fell and splattered brain matter on the rock-

(HURRY UP PLEASE)

“Goodnight Tom. Goodnight Jack,” Alex cried into dirt crusted hands. “Goodnight Jones, Goodnight-.”

_Goodnight, goodnight._

“Goodnight, ladies-” _you died, Alex,_ “-goodnight-” _you smashed yourself on the ground,_ “-goodnight, _goodnight.”_

#  iii. The Fire Sermon

Alex’s hand was broken: the last fingers of his left.

He clutched them and sunk to the ground, wind whistling as he dropped. Crossing the brown stone unheard, the statue’s gaze departed.

Sweet air whistle softly until he end his song-

_Thrum._

The ground bore no empty bones, no sandwiched skulls or bloodied clothing. Uncoloured rocks, wounds now mend. 

Like a story he’d tell Tom on summer nights, when his family left and Ian departed. And their friends from school and parliament children vanished off on their own vacations.

Except it wasn’t a story and Alex _knew_ he died. Kneeling on a stone walkway bawling like an _idiot_ \- like Tom when he slipped into the Thames on a run. Except Alex fell and he _died-._

He didn’t talk, not out loud for a long while. At his back, he felt cold air brush by and heard the rattling shake of his body’s bones and the hollow chuckle that spread ear to ear. He crept softly through the concretion, dragging his bloodied slimy belly on the rock. Flopping about like a fish in a dull canal.

Cold like a winter’s evening musing on his fractured garish wreck- and on the cliff edge where Alex died before. A white body dirtied red on the low damp ground. Bones cast in a little low dry gully rattled the fragments of his foot broken before- and never.

Back above in impossible thrum of time, Alex heard the bounding horn and motor that pulled sweetly on his mind. The cave lit like moonlight illuminating both his blood patch and no other, able to wash away in soda water.

_Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!_

( _And O those children’s voices singing in the dome!)_

‡

Drip drip drip

Thu-thump...thu-thump...thu-...thump...thu-....

So rudely forced.

_THRUM_

‡

An unreal city under the brain fog of impossible noon. Alex’s rebirth, the smiling mire. Unsullied, with a pocket full of dirt, memories at sight. He asked in demonic French:

_Am I your lunch, your cannon fodder? Following death with this metropoli- no, metropo-shit?_

At his violent hour, when his eyes turned black. Turned upward from his sprawl when the human cage waited, throbbing like an engine- _waiting._

“I, Alex, though confused as fuck and pretty sure I’m on my second life-”

_Old man with wrinkles and a gunshot on his breast, can you see?_

Alex flinched away, at his violet hour, the evening of his life that flashed in riptide pulls like his Russian sailor dragging his corpse to sea. Proceeding to return home for teatime, cleaning his gun and turning on the stove to cook food from tins. Out of the window spread his drying clothes last touched by Alex’s dying breath. At night pulled off shirts and stays, sleeping with wrinkled brow-

Alex perceived the scene and knew the rest. How he waited for his expected guest, he, the young man’s companion- _killer-_ arrived. At a small house with a flat stare. And Alex had been so sure, sitting with a silk hat with all the time in the world he guessed.

_Wrong._

The meal ended, he was bored and tired, agreed to engage- _kills him-_ enacted a joke and threw him to sleep with the fish, a welcome of indifference. (And threw him adrift, who sat by the Thames and chucked him below the wall. Yassen who walked among the lowest of the dead. Bestowing one final patronizing wave-.

‡

“Fuck!” Alex shouted, turning away to look at the rock as cold as glass. Hardly aware of his departed life; brain allowing one half-formed thought to pass: “ _well now that’s done: and I’m glad it's over.”_

When a loveless man stoops to meet and paces about his room alone. Smoothing his gun with an automatic hand puts a bullet in its chamber. Its path crept on him upon the waters, along the street- and Alex can sometimes hear the pleasant whining of a mandoline-

- _and a clatter and a chatter from within and bloodied voice-_

Into the river where fishermen lounge at noon: where the walls hide a martyr and show the splendour of yachts in white and gold. _The river sweats_

_Oil and blood_

_The barges drift_

_With turning tide_

_Red sails_

_Wide_

_To leeway, swing the heavy bag_

_The body washes_

_Like drifting logs_

_Down the Greenwich reach_

_Past the Isle of Dogs_

_Weilalala leia_

_Wallala leialala_

_Alex and Yassen_

_Bloodied oars_

_The smile had formed_

_A golden smile_

_Gold (-now red)_

_A brisk shudder_

_Rippling the shore_

_Thrown southwest_

_Carried down water_

_The peal of bells_

_And church towers_

_Weilalala leia_

_Wallala leialala_

“Okay,” Alex said, “so, you showed me dying and bloodied shit.”

He burned and buried in a church with Tom in pew. It undid him, crumpled him to his knees. Supine on the floor and Alex in a narrow urn.

“I was in Moorgate,” he said, “and my heart blasted out of my goddamn body. And after _that_ Yassen was sad, and went off to a new start?”

The cave made no comment. What should it say?

‡

Alex said, “I get that but I literally just died below.”

_Nothing on nothing._

He remembered the broken fingernails on his dirty hands. A humbling pain of something that now left Alex expecting nothing.

‡

_La la_

_To the Cave then it came_

_Burning burning burning my leg is- fucking bur-BURNING_

_“O fuck- oh god please please please end this.”_

_“Oh god oh Jesus christ or god please-.”_

_THRUM_

# iV. Death by Water

Alex the dumbass, in outright dread, forgot the cry of the birds and fell into a deep water swell, gambling and lost to a current below the surface.

It pickled his bone in whispers, tugging him as he rose and fell. Screaming spluttering, cold and splintering through ages and youth. Entering the whirlpool, screaming- “oh _Fuck You cave!”_

He scrambled about, looking upward. Considered a death for someone as tired as him.

_THRUM._

# V. What the Thunder Said

After the torchlight lit red on a sweaty face-

After the frosty silence in the cliff gullies-

After the agony in stony places-

The shouting and the crying, echoing through a prison of pumice via reverberation. Rattling of thunder over old distant mountains. Alex who was living and now dead. _THRUM_

Alex who was living and now dying _THRUM_

With a little patience. _(Please)_

Alex found a place where there was no more water but only rock, and the sandy road reminding him of the old roads winding above through the mountains. Where in Petra they made mountains of rock without water- 

If there were water it would demand he stop and drink, amongst the rocks where his blood and- _THRUM-_ he could not stop or think.

His sweat was dry and his feet stuck in the sand, fingers trailing against the rock pondering- _if only there were water-_

_THRUM_

Trapped in a dead mountain’s mouth of curious teeth that couldn’t spit him out. Where Alex could never stand or lie or sit- _THRUM._

There is not even silence in the mountains, but a dry sterile rattle of thunder and his screams without rain. There is no solitude in the mountains, but red broken faces seeing stains and snarled splatters.

At the door of the sandstone temple- _if there were water- THRUM._

And no more rock, if there were rock but also water- _THRUM_

And water- _THRUM_

A spring- _THRUM_

A pool among the rock- _THRUM_

If there were the sound of water only and not the cicada helicopter, and the swat team singing to him water over rock-.

Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees near the Thames.

_Drip drop drip drop-_

_“Rider? Agent Rider? Do you copy?”_

But there is no water or thrumming.

‡

_“Who is that- no, walking beside Jones?”_

When Alex counted, there was only him and her together.

But when he looked in a mirror up the white halls of the Bank, there was always another one, walking in his step. Gliding, wrapped in brown clothes. Hooded absent eyes. Indistinct of now or then-

_“No- no on her other side. Who is that? Not Alex Rider.”_

What is that sound high in the air, the murmur of metal lamentation. The hooded hordes swarming barricaded doors, over endless plains and shooting over cracked earth.

Ringed by the flat horizon, bombing a city over the mountains. Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violent air.

Falling towers, screaming children.

Alex slipped and fell.

Alex drowned.

Unreal.

‡

Jones drew her hair out from its tight bun, fiddling whispers on her strings. Looked at her agent with baby faces in the violet light, hearing his heart beat their strings.

He crawled head downward down the black hall, upside down in his mind and thoughts.

Tolling reminiscent bells he smiled at that she couldn’t understand.

“They sing nice,” he said to the funeral outside, an empty cistern and exhausted wells.

‡

In a decaying cave among the mountains, in the faint moonlight, a woman is singing. Over the tumbled graves about her chapel.

There is the empty chapel, her only home. It has no windows and the spirit swings.

Dry bones can harm no one

No one can dry the bones.

_T.H.R.U.M._

Her cave screams lightning, of a coppery gust. Dripping rain.

‡

The land of Ganga sunk in the ground leaves limp and waiting for rain. Black clouds gathered far distant over Himarvant- Himalayan Mountains. The jungle crouched, steeped in silence and then the clouds spoke the thunder.

_(Giving)_

“Yassen,” he said, “what have we given?”

Alex sat, blood shaking his heart. Urged in the awful daring of a moment’s surrender which that of innocence can never reach. An age of prudence that can never retract.

By that, and that only, both he and Alex existed. Which would never be mentioned in their obituaries, or in the memories of others- either dogs or black widow spiders. Or in mission reports shelved by men who cared for nothing more than themselves. 

Together existed in their empty rooms.

_(Compassion)_

“I heard you have a boat not far from here,” he said, pointing to the side of the jungle with a halfhearted tremble. “I heard you have the key”

“Thinking of an escape only confirms your state of prisoner.”

Only at nightfall they spoke, genuine rumors. Reviving something broken under a different sky.

_(Control)_

The boat responded easily to the hand of an expert with sail and motor. The sea was calm, and his heart responded happily- when invited, beating obediently to controlling hands.

Alex sat upon the stern fishing with the arid sands behind him.

“What changed your mind, little Alex?”

_(Shall I at least set my lands in order?)_

“London Bridge is falling down, falling down…” he said, “falling down. Thrum.”

A turn of head and Alex sang, “ _Poi s’acose nel foco che gli affina”_

“Dante’s purgatory?”

“ _Quando fiam uti chelidon”_

_(When shall I become like the swallow?)_

“Do you fall often, little Alex?”

_“Le Prince d’Aquitaine a la tour abolie”_

_(The Prince of Aquitania, his tower in ruins)_

“The poem of a madman greeting insanity?”

Alex told Yassen, “these fragments crashed along my ruins. And now I fit you- datta, dayadhvam, damyata.”

Yassen tilted his head, saying: “Those are the three duties. Giving. Compassion. Control. The duties each individual must sacrifice to the gods. The sound of thunder, and the potential for rain.”

_(Please) (Shantih) (Please) (Shantih) (Please) (Shantih)_

Alex laughed.

**Author's Note:**

> For everyone who didn't quite understand it.  
> This story is almost line for line, the poem The Wasteland by T.S. Elliot.  
> Yes.  
> Line. For. Line.  
> turned into a FIC.


End file.
